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Lead with Who You Are (2004)Many of my songs start from the last place in the song you'd expect. The phrase that spawned this song, for instance, was the bit about "a tomboy in capri pants". In honor of a friend's birthday, a group of my girlfriends decided the outing du jour would be a trip to the outlet malls. It is only as an act of sacrificial friendship and out of deference to the Birthday Spirit that I was in attendance. I do not shop. I was never a fan, and since I have discovered the REI outlet and Campmor internet sites, I find I can buy most of the clothes I wear without leaving home. At one point in the day, I was helping a friend look for a pair of capri pants, and she held them up to me to see what they would look like. I instinctively jumped back three feet, and apparently had a horrified expression on my face, which slowly faded to bewilderment as I realized that the three friends gathered nearby had no idea what I was reacting to. I mean, I have nothing against capri pants per se. They look cute on many people. There is nothing wrong with them as far as I'm concerned. And yet how anyone could know me for multiple years and not understand that my actually wearing a pair was a complete metaphysical impossibility... this was a concept I was unprepared to process. Rather than attempt to explain, all I could do was laugh. This got me going thinking about all the ways that I and many of us waste time passing for normal when being our own weird selves is certainly what we're equipped to do best. I started feeling annoyed about all the things I was doing halfheartedly that were weighing me down, when really I just wanted to put my energy into getting down to the business of living life to its fullest.lead with who you are:I met my singer/songwriter friend Kate for coffee once to ask her advice on how to deal a little better with the business and marketing end of the music world. One of the first things she asked, as I sat there with my hair in a ponytail, adorned with a fairly well-distributed layer of sawdust from an afternoon of overhead routing, was my age. I told her I was thirty-one. She paused, then suggested, "I wouldn't lead with that."the Coriolis effect:"The apparent tendency of moving objects, as seen from the rotating surface of a planet, to veer off to one side or the other, depending on whether the object is north or south of the equator." All the images in this bridge section, from Buick to billiards, are about straight lines and curves and slants and the somewhat irritating obligation to keep in mind that which is which depends entirely on one's assumed frame of reference. |
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